About

CISAC (International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) is a global organisation dedicated to safeguarding, promoting and lobbying on behalf of the rights and interests of creative individuals and organisations the world over. It supports international creators from the music, print, audio-visual, drama and other genres, creating a unique and multi-faceted challenge for CISAC’s legal team. Director general Gadi Oron, who is a copyright law specialist and the individual with ultimate responsibility for legal matters, emphasises this by stating that ‘the diversity in skills required in working in such a global network is particularly impressive. We do not just do traditional legal work but also legal policy work and governmental relations too’. The organisation operates at a high level, working alongside other international organisations in order to shape international law in their chosen field. As Oron explains: ‘at an international level we have been lobbying heavily with WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] who held a one day conference based on the rights of visual artists. This is just the beginning of a process that will hopefully result in an international treaty’. On top of its already wide-reaching remit, CISAC’s legal team has made efforts to reach out to support new geographic areas in cooperation with other organisations. Towards this end, it has ‘coordinated with ARIPO [the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization] to achieve a cooperation agreement to do joint projects and develop copyright frameworks across Africa and create an international network for collective management of rights’. Alongside this high-level work, the team also undertakes tasks that are familiar to a more typical in-house legal team, including ‘legal corporate work, issues dealing with statutes of the organisation, contractual work and also a lot of briefings on legal developments for members’.